Foundling (15 page)

Europe gave a chuckle, then sat back, her chin stuck out pompously. “I prefer the name teratologist or, if one must be vulgar, pugnator. But yes, my boy, you have it in two. No doubt you have heard of my kind—how we are spooky, how we are scary, how you common folk couldn’t live without us? Hmm? Well, it’s all true, and worse. Mine is a life of violence. Would you like a life of violence, little man?”

Rossamünd shook his head cautiously.

“What about a life of adventure, then? Is that where you’re bound? To begin some adventurous life in High Vesting?”

The boy thought for a moment, bowing his head under her beady hazel-brown gaze, and eventually shrugged.

“Hmph!” Europe pursed her lips. “What I’d like to know is this: when does adventure stop and violence begin? Answer me that and we’ll both be wiser.”

Fransitart had been right after all: lahzars were strange and discomfiting folk. Rossamünd regretted accepting this one’s assistance. Once more he had no real idea of what she was talking about, and certainly no idea how to reply.

At that moment Licurius stepped up holding a pewter dish full of what looked like steaming black oil, gluggy and evil-smelling. The foundling almost gagged at the stink of the stuff, but Europe put down her large book, took the dish gratefully and drank the filthy contents in a manner that Madam Opera would have declared sternly was “very unladylike!” A tingle of disgust shivered down Rossamünd’s ribs as the fulgar drained the dregs and sighed a contented sigh.

“Many times better,” she smiled, showing teeth scummed with black as she handed the dish back to the ever-patient Licurius. She took out her crow’s claw hair-tine and comb, letting silken, chestnut locks free; then she dimmed the lantern, lay back, wrapped herself in a blanket and without another word fell asleep.

It was then that another stench assaulted Rossamünd’s senses: the leer had lit the cones of repellent, and their exotic fumes were now drifting over the camp. It was like nothing Rossamünd had ever encountered before and it made him feel wretched. His head began to pound and his very soul was gripped by an urgency to flee. His discomfort must have shown, for he was sure Licurius was regarding him closely beneath that blank box of a face. Wrapping his scarf about his nose and throat as if to keep out the cold, but rather to muffle the reek, Rossamünd tried to show that nothing was wrong. Nevertheless the leer paused and leaned closer.

The boy was sure he heard sniffing: the faint but definite snuffling of smells.

Then, for the first time since their meeting, the leer spoke. “Do you fare
well
, boy?” The voice came as a wheezing, hissing whisper, strangely unmuffled despite the impediment of the sthenicon. “You look like you’ve had a nasty turn there. All’s well, is it? D’ye not like the stink of our potives?”

Feeling a greater threat under the blank gaze of this man than in the manic ways of the fulgar, Rossamünd cowered in his muffle. He did not know whether to nod or shake his head, and just wobbled it in circles vigorously.

“You smell
funny
to me. Did you know that?
Wheeze
. . . you smell funny to me . . .” The leer leaned yet closer. “Answer, boy, or do you want of a man’s courage with such a
pretty
name?”

Momentarily speechless, the foundling blinked several times, completely baffled.
What harm is there in smelling funny?
“I su . . . suppose I do, sir,” he started. “I haven’t had a bath for well over a week now. I reckon the river has made it worse.”

“
Hiss!
I know river-ssmell, upssstart,” Licurius returned, shaking with inexplicable rage. “And unwashed bodiess too. You are neither of thesse.You ssmell wrong!
Wheeze
. . .”

“I . . .” When would this fellow just leave him alone? Who cared how he smelled? For the first time since he had left the foundlingery, Rossamünd thought about the knife Fransitart had given him, still in its scabbard at the end of his baldric, thought whether he might be forced to produce it as an aid to his defense. What a strange and terrible notion—cudgels were one thing, but knives and other slitting-slicing tools quite another. “Master Fransitart told me that people from different cities eat different foods, that each would make them smell
funny
to other folk.”

“Of courssse.” The leer stroked his throat with a hand gloved in black velvet. He sounded less than convinced.

Europe shifted restlessly, then turned to her side and intervened with a soft voice as she did so. “Leave him be, Licurius. Everyone has their secrets. Perhaps
he
should ask you, oh great leer, about a certain Frestonian girl . . .”

At this Licurius stepped back and away from Rossamünd with an odd gurgle, to the boy’s great relief. Shortly after, the leer doused the fire, crept to his cradle beneath the landaulet and bothered the boy no more. Even so, eyes wide in the dark, Rossamünd stayed awake for a long time, well into the small hours, feeling more unsafe than he ever had when he had bunked by himself in the haystack or the boxthorn. Not even the happy appearance of Phoebë as nighttime clouds blew away east cheered him.

He felt terribly alone.

 

The next day, the leer paid Rossamünd no more mind than he had at any other time other than the bizarre bedtime incident last night. After another draft of that black ichor had been brewed for Europe, and the foundling had wandered briefly for a relieving stroll, they were on their way again into a frigid fog. By midmorning the vapors cleared and the country began changing. The fields became smaller and fewer and the land rockier, sloping upward ever more until they found themselves on the stony, uncultivated heights before a forested valley. This depression was filled with a great wood of evergreen beeches and stately pines, and into it the road now descended. Rain had washed broad ruts into the Vestiweg as it went down the flanks of the valley, creating enough of a hazard that Licurius was obliged to get down from his seat and lead the horse carefully on foot.

Europe frowned at the poor condition of the road. “Roadway gone to clay, bring two shoes and carry one away,” she sighed, sipping at a glass of claret and sucking on—of all things—a chunk of rock salt. Draining the glass, she looked sidelong at her young passenger and suddenly leaned across, taking his small hands in hers.

Rossamünd started and pulled back, not knowing what to expect. The lahzar stroked his knuckles absentmindedly, and even though her touch was as soft as Verline’s and her grip gentle, he was very aware that she just might shock him or worse.

She smiled. “I apologize for my factotum’s behavior last night,” she offered quietly. “He’s a curious fellow, and this serves me well most of the time. Unfortunately it also makes him . . .
twitchy,
one might say. Pay him no heed—he’s harmless enough.”

Rossamünd could see how, to a fulgar of such self-confessed might as Europe, Licurius might seem less than threatening. But to this boy, the leer was anything but harmless.

“Now, very shortly I am going to have some work to do.” Europe released his hands with a pat and sat back. “And you might find it scary enough, but fear not: I have been in business for a great long while now.” She paused and looked heavenward, tapping her lips with a long, elegant finger. “Hmmm, too long perhaps. Nevertheless, you can be assured that you are safe.”

Rossamünd looked about. “Will there be
monsters
?” he whispered.

Europe laughed—a bright, crystalline chortle—as they entered the dark gloom beneath ancient eaves. “My, my, there are
always
monsters!”

“Really?
Always
?” The foundling sat up.

Europe nodded gravely. “I am afraid so, yes. Here, there and everywhere—not that city folk would know. It’s out here in the nether regions that the nickers roam and the bogles lurk. But lo! Not a fear, Europe is here!” She finished with a flourish of her hand and a grin.

Rossamünd blinked.

The light was growing dim, though the time was barely midday, as the road drove deeper and deeper into the wood—a deep green dusk full of hushed expectancy and subtle murmurings. Trunks huge and old spread out great, knobbled roots furry with moss, about which the leaf-carpeted road was forced to bend and twist. There was little undergrowth but for some scattered colonies of fungus—tall, thin, capped mushrooms, large, flat toad-stools, tiny red must, which even Rossamünd knew was good for eating and for certain potions, and plump puffballs ready to pop. Bracken grew everywhere else, even upon the trees, while thin myrtle saplings sprouted here and there, struggling for life.

Rossamünd had never been in such a place as this and found its appearance marvelous, more wild and beautiful than any of Boschenberg’s elegant, manicured parks. Yet there was a great watchfulness here, a feeling of being observed and unwelcome.This place was threwdish: a place where monsters might like to dwell. It marred the woods’ beauty and oppressed the visitor. He shivered and checked his almanac, squinting to read in the dimness. They had entered the Brindlewood, or so it said.

“What does that contain?” Europe asked a little too loudly, as she fixed her hair back into the bunlike style, just as it had been the day before.

“I was just finding out where we were,” said Rossamünd.

The lahzar chuckled. “I could have told you that. This”—she waved about grandly—“is the
Grintwoode
. . . or the Brindleshaws, as the locals will have it. We’re on the northernmost marches of the Smallish Fells, the western tip of Sulk End, having recently entered the domain and jurisdiction of High Vesting.” She pointed casually to the book with her crowfoot hair-tine before poking it into the bun and comb. “I think you’ll find I am right.”

The almanac agreed. Rossamünd was impressed.

Giving a bored look, she sighed. “I’ve been here before. ’Tis a troublesome place.”

A short time later Licurius brought the landaulet to a halt, stopping at a bend where the road began to descend even more steeply, falling over a series of folds in the earth before disappearing below around the flank of the hill. He alighted and went to the rear of the carriage. Rossamünd heard thumpings and scrapings.The factotum reappeared on Europe’s side holding a great pole about twelve feet long, as thick as a man’s thumb and tightly wrapped in copper wire. It was a fuse. Rossamünd had heard and read of them but had not seen one until now. He stared at it in open wonder.

She must be about to fight
. Rossamünd’s heart began to pound in anticipation.

The lahzar took the fuse from the leer with a sweet smile and laid it across both seats, one end sticking some way over the side of the landaulet. Then she retrieved something out of her precious black box and put it in her mouth, chewing slowly with a disgusted look. These apparent necessities done, they were on their way again, Licurius now driving from the seat once more. The road went into a steep decline cut into the side of a hill carpeted in pine needles, bending always right and going always down. From their vantage point Rossamünd could see that they would soon come to a stone bridge a little farther below, which crossed a narrow, moatlike ravine.

Europe finished her mouthful and fixed her small passenger with a serious eye. “Now, however, things shall soon proceed. You must declare to me that you will stay here within the landaulet no matter what. Do you declare it?”

Going white and wide-eyed, he nodded. “Aye, madam.”

“I’m sure you do.”

The roadway dipped for a moment as it crossed a creek, then passed right through and over the crown of a small knoll, either side flanked by a high earth cutting topped with sinuous pines. Beyond and below, the road widened in a clearing of grass and shattered tree stumps before constricting again at the bridge, which spanned the narrow gap in a solid, gentle curve. As they arrived on the farther edge of this clearing, Rossamünd thought he heard a rumbling, a kind of slow thudding, though he could not be sure.

Licurius halted the landaulet and climbed down once more. With a respectful bow he offered Europe his gloved hand as she alighted. The thudding was unmistakable now, like great footsteps, and echoes among the trunks made it sound as if it was all around. While her factotum held her fuse, the fulgar straightened her frock coat, tightened buckles and secured buttons. Suddenly the whole forest seemed to burst with a stentorian cracking.

Rossamünd leaped to his seat and looked about wildly to find the danger as Licurius lunged for the bridle of the spooked nag. There! Just before the bridge a young pine was collapsing, pushed out of the way by the tallest creature the foundling had ever seen.

It looked just like an enormous person, taller than ten tall men, except that its legs were too short, its arms too long, and its body altogether too thick, too hunched and too rectangular. It was an ettin—one of the biggest of the land monsters—and it peered about momentarily before fixing a critical eye on the landaulet.

“Fie, fie, what do I spy? Gold-toting travelers passing us by,” it boomed in a surprisingly well-spoken way, forming the words with great articulations of its jaw through a mouth full of protruding, blackened and spadelike teeth. It stepped into the clearing, sending the shattered pine toppling into the gorge.

Europe gave Rossamünd a passing wink. “How so, how so, to do my work I go,” she murmured, then she turned and marched directly toward the ettin, shouldering the fuse and waving to get its attention.

Rossamünd was agog: surely she did not think to challenge such a fearsome foe? It wore a large smock for modesty’s sake made up of many hessian sacks stitched very roughly together. Under its left arm the ettin carried a great barrel, which had probably been a vat for aging wine or brewing beer. The ettin waggled this distinctly, pointing within its wide gape.

“I’ll not stop your chill-day stroll,” the ettin hoomed, “if you’ll not shrink from the bridge-crossing toll.”